Tactile Perception
by R.C. McLachlan
Summary: "The day I met you, I knew you would see me." Her hands find his face, sliding over his jaw, his cheeks, and she brings their foreheads together. "The day I met you, I hit you with my car. Twice." (Post-film, no spoilers)


By the time she's finished with the second verse there is a large hand delving beneath her shirt and slowly sweeping up her side, a clever thumb drawing gooseflesh in its wake. She smiles up at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars Darcy stuck to her ceiling last year and stops humming, content to do a little touch reconnaissance of her own, the pads of her fingers walking up a trapezius muscle that anatomists the world over would weep at the sight of.

Thor rubs his nose against the skin laid bare by her collar and then settles back down on her shoulder. "What is that?"

"Hmm?"

"That song," Thor murmurs. He's attempting to speak softly but he doesn't quite manage it. Voices carry at night, but Thor's carries no matter the time or place. "Is it just a melody or are there words?"

Jane can't help the embarrassed grin that spreads across her face, the heat in her cheeks, and says, "It's got words. It's a, uh, it's a kid's song."

His hand drifts up from where it rests on the curve of her rib cage and trails over the skin between her breasts, large fingers cupping the swell of them, her nipples, and she sighs. Sometimes he does this, touches her with no purpose behind it, just for the sake of it. When she asked him about it, he'd been unselfconscious in his answer, all his concentration on her as he said, "When I touch you, I know peace."

She can't deny the way it grounds her in a way very few things do. She's never more in a moment than when he puts his hands on her.

"Sing it for me?" He asks, and finally his voice reaches a level that won't make Darcy pound on the wall next door.

Jane chuckles and cups the back of his head in her hand, holding his cheek to her breast, cradling him close. "I have a terrible voice."

"I have heard you sing, so I am not refuting that," he says, and she swats at him. "But I wish to hear it."

She laughs a little and looks at the stars above her, the ones Darcy got as a joke and then they spent three hours painstakingly placing them in constellations, accurately depicting the summer sky of Puente Antiguo because she can't see the stars in London, and she breathes out, then in, and—

_"Well, I'd like to visit the moon,_  
_Like a rocket ship high in the air._  
_Yes, I'd like to visit the moon,_  
_But I don't think I'd like to live there._

_Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above_  
_I would miss all the places and the people I love._  
_So, although I might like it for one afternoon,_  
_I don't want to live on the moon."_

It's completely awful. Her voice cracks on 'places' and she sort of talk-sings the last two lines as quickly as she can to get it over with. She's suddenly back in her fourth grade Christmas concert with Ms. Brophy telling her to maybe stand in the back where she won't break the harmony of the rest of the kids. _I appreciate your enthusiasm, Jane, but… I'm not sure if Chorus is where you ought to be during Enrichment time. Maybe gym…?_

"Well." She coughs. She twitches. She looks up and widens her eyes at Ursa Major, which is lopsided and Dubhe is a little farther out than it should be, and wills it to turn into an actual bear and devour her. "There are—there are like three or four more verses about living in the sea and the jungle, but I won't subj—mmph!"

Thor kisses like he wields his hammer: hard, and with feeling. Her mouth is swollen and tingly when he pulls away, his fingers gentle where they brush her bottom lip.

"It was lovely," he says, and not one part of her doubts his sincerity. "Is it a song all children know?"

"It's—" she starts, but he leans down and kisses her again, a soft press of lips there and gone. Her heart is going to crack a rib. "It's a… There's this show called _Sesame Street_ and it's been on for… pretty much forever. It's an educational thing for young kids—learning to count, achieving goals. I watched it all the time growing up, and that's where I learned the song. I was just… I wanted to visit the moon so bad when I was a kid. And I hated that it was about missing everything you'd leave behind, because I wouldn't. I wouldn't have wanted to come back. I used to think about changing the words."

His lips slide against her as they curl into a smile, and he says, "What was it about the cosmos that interested you so?"

She remembers being seven years old and sitting on her father's shoulders, following the line of his arm as he pointed to the bright star in the sky that wasn't a star at all—it didn't twinkle like the others. _"Stars are like points of light—and our atmosphere refracts them in all directions, so it looks like they twinkle. Planets have finite size, Jane-bug, and that helps them look stable."_ And he showed her Saturn's rings through his telescope, a sad imitation of the giant one he worked with, and he told her that the universe was connected through tiny strings, and somewhere out there was life, because _"it's arrogant of us to say we are the only ones. Remember what 'arrogant' means, Jane-bug? Tell me, use it in a sentence."_

Thor's hand pauses, stopped on the sensitive area that sits beneath her belly button and just above the V of her legs, and he peers at her. "Is it private?"

Jane startles, and then laughs. "No, sorry. I just got kind of—anyway. My dad worked with Eric for years, and for him it was… it was work. But when I first started out, it was the possibility. I was a tiny speck in a vast perhaps whose image was based only on theory and a few pictures. Dad used to tell me that a scientist was always prepared for whatever the universe would throw at them, and if I wanted to be one of them, if I wanted to follow in his footsteps, I'd have to always be ready to expect the unexpected."

He presses a kiss to the side of her nose, just under her bottom lash line, and she grins.

"He never mentioned what I should do when the universe literally spits a big, blond guy from another world at me, though, so maybe he didn't know as much as he—_oh my god, Thor_!"

In a second, she is suddenly straddling him, her fingers interlocked with his, and he beams up at her like he didn't just roll them with all the grace of a wrestler in the middle of a championship match.

"You did not expect that, either," Thor says cheekily, and his hands are so stupidly big that they practically swallow hers. "Did your father teach you nothing at all?"

"Oh my god, really? I sing for you and tell you a heartwarming story from my past and _this_ is the thanks I get?" She tries to sound offended and shocked, but mostly she just laughs. "I get _sass_ and weird WWF moves? What is this, huh? Tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do with this, universe."

"Enjoy it for the obvious gift it is." He practically sings it, grinning wide, and he moves their interlocked hands up and down as if he were driving a forklift, and she leans down until she can rest her forehead against his, and he holds her weight like she's nothing, tilting his chin up to press his lips between her eyebrows, the swell of her cheek. She giggles like an idiot while he laughs into her mouth.

"A gift?"

"Mm," he agrees, licking just under her chin.

She shivers and buries her hand in his hair, yanking playfully. "A gift that eats all my food, uses all my hot water, leaves his wet towels everywhere—seriously, everywhere—and hogs the TV so he can watch _The Only Way Is Essex_?"

He grins. "I would see Gemma Collins as leader of the bright-faced warrior women who preside over the battlefield."

"You can just say 'valkyrie,' you know," Jane says with an eye roll.

"Then you can say 'Bifrost'."

"The technical term is Einstein-Ros—" He kisses her just to shut her up, and she's pretty okay with that. "All right. Your turn."

He blinks up at her. "Mine?"

"_Quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things._" Her Hannibal Lecter impression is first-rate, and it's completely wasted on him. He stares at her like she's just declared war on Asgard. "Okay, we're going to fix that with a movie marathon worthy of a god. But seriously, your turn. Tell me something. Tell me about your childhood pet. Your favorite book. Have you always worn a cape? What's your favorite color? Do you like potatoes? I just… I don't know anything about you. Tell me about your mother. Tell me about… Tell me about Loki."

Jane has never been good at reading people. She knows more about the Grand Unification Epoch than the difference between shock and awe; X and Y bosons tell her everything that different kinds of smiles can't. It made for an awkward adolescence, never knowing just who amongst her peers was genuine, who she could actually call a friend. Science had been the kind of buffer she'd needed back then, but looking back on it, it did her a major disservice, because she has no idea how to quantify the way Thor is looking at her now.

"You—" He breathes, his right hand dislodging from hers to cup her cheek. "You wish to know…?"

She coughs and shrugs, flustered. Fucking up pillow talk—par for the course, really. Sometimes she can't believe how much she lives up to the awkward scientist stereotype. It'd be funny if it weren't so damn sad. "I just… You don't have to. I mean, you don't have to tell me anything if you don't—Why don't we just, uh, go to bed?"

Thor says nothing, just stares up at her with impossibly blue eyes, the reflection of a dozen plastic constellations reflected there, seemingly content to just… touch her.

She is going to jitter out of her skin if he doesn't say something. "Thor—"

"I've had many bedmates," he says, and she knows she should say something about how much she doesn't want to hear about all the women he's had, because she really doesn't, but something in his face stops her. The words die before she can even formulate a snappy reply. "All who wished to bed Thor Odinson, sky keeper, and… none who wished to know the man beneath the armor and accolades. Jane. _Jane Foster_. The day I met you, I knew you would see me."

Her hands find his face, sliding over his jaw, his cheeks, and she brings their foreheads together again. "The day I met you, I hit you with my car. Twice."

Air puffs against her lips as he laughs. "You did. I thought it perhaps a Midgardian greeting."

"No, more like I need to actually look behind me when I back out of a space," she says, smiling, helpless in the face of his… she's not actually sure, but it could be relief. "Hey. Hey, you don't have to tell me anything."

He gently coaxes her back so he can look at her. "I want to tell you. I want to tell you everything."

There isn't an equation in any realm in any universe that can calculate how much she loves him. There isn't a children's song to be sung about what she will do to keep him for as long as he wants her. There is only this moment, his hands on her, her plastic stars above them, and the universe yawns beyond it all with stars that twinkle and planets that sort of don't.

She leans down and kisses him softly. "Favorite color?"

Thor smiles. "Red."

.

_So, although you've been here for, like, one afternoon,__  
__Would you live with me forever on the moon?_


End file.
